This marathon runner was just 26 seconds shy of breaking the 2-hour barrier
Olympian Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya came just shy of running a sub-two-hour marathon Saturday, nearly accomplishing one of the most anticipated feats in sports.
Kipchoge completed the 26.2-mile race in just two hours and 25 seconds. His time isn't eligible to set a new world record because he had a pace car, but it shaves more than two minutes off the current world record of 2:02:57 and slightly more off Kipchoge's previous personal best of 2:03:05.
Kipchoge is part of Nike's Breaking2 project, which has developed high-tech shoes and an innovative pacing formation to minimize wind resistance. To successfully break two hours, a runner must maintain a pace of 4:34 per mile, and seemingly minor factors like small variations of temperature or humidity can make — or, in this case, break — a performance.
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"I was aiming for 1:59, but I'm happy to run two hours in [a] marathon," Kipchoge said post-race. "The world is only 25 seconds away." Watch him cross the finish line below. Bonnie Kristian
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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